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My Way

An exploration of the benefits and costs of stubbornness. If you're a 15-year-old boy, and you don't want to fall in love, maybe you can just decide not to do it. Ever. Stories of trying to cheat death, love, political reality, and memory with only an idiosyncratic vision and a lot of stamina.

Host Ira Glass talks with Larry Wegielski. For almost 50 years, Larry and his wife Ve-ve were inseparable. They worked together 13 hours a day, 6 days a week in a liquor store. If Ve-ve had an appointment somewhere in town, Larry would drive her. They even had a slogan: "Side by side, baby." When Ve-ve died, Larry wasn't ready to stop being together, so he came up with a plan to continue spending time with her. Sort of.

Joe's 14, and all around him his friends are going crazy: getting crushes, flirting, asking people out, having their hearts broken. Joe doesn't want any of this—the acting stupid, the pain—so he decides just to opt out...and never fall in love.

Reporter Nazanin Rafsanjani brings us the story of Brad Blanton, a psychologist who founded a philosophy called "Radical Honesty." Brad believes that the way to be happy is to tell the truth all the time. This philosophy helped him help a lot of people as a therapist. But it got in the way a little when, in 2006, he left his practice, ran for a seat in the US Congress, and became that rarest of things: a political candidate who never lies.

Marcus Halevi is a documentary photographer who has photographed victims of war and injustice all over the world. But there's one sequence of photographs, which he took right here in the United States, that haunts him more than any other. Director Josh Seftel is making a film about Halevi's life, and we collaborated with him on this story.